I think the hardest thing to teach a student is that what he or she puts down on paper is changeable. It's not the final thing, it's the first thing, which may just be the suggestive, vague identification of something that you have to come back to and rewrite. (M. H. Abrams)

Every syllable that can be struck out is pure profit, and every page that can be economised is a five-per-cent dividend. Nature rebels against this rule; the flesh is weak, and shrinks from the scissors; I groan in retrospect over the weak. (Henry Brooks Adams)

In the editing process, I delete what I do not want to use, move what remains around if necessary and add elements that I feel will make my visual statement as clear and understandable as possible. (Gerald Brommer)

One cannot simply take nature as she is. The task of composing a surface and arranging the material before you requires a feeling for balance and visual weight. There must be a certainty in the placement of objects, as well as an ability to edit. (Scott L. Christensen)

Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it. (Sidonie Gabrielle Colette)

Editing is now the easiest thing on earth to do, and all the things that evolved out of word processing - 'Oh, let's put that sentence there, let's get rid of this' - have become commonplace in films and music too. (Brian Eno)

I love the idea of leaving some of the original abstract thought in, because the problem is that when you pick up a pen you become a snob, your own worse critic. You edit yourself in a way that is non-creative. (Glen Hansard)

I don't take notes; I don't outline, I don't do anything like that. I just flail away at the goddamn thing. I'm a salami writer. I try to write good salami, but salami is salami. You can't sell it as caviar. (Stephen King)

I came to a dead stop and began major revisions. Sometimes these entailed the shredding of all existing manuscript for a fresh start - an inefficient way to write a book, though I found it exciting. (William Manchester)

Maybe because I was trained as a writer, I edit while I paint. For me, it's part of the process and it gets me where I want to go. I don't have the ability to see my finished painting in my mind's eye before it hits the canvas. (Bonnie Mandoe)

The conscious mind is the editor, and the subconscious mind is the writer. And the joy of writing, when you're writing from your subconscious, is beautiful – it's thrilling. When you're editing, which is your conscious mind, it's like torture. (Steve Martin)

-Oasis Magazine, June 2008...I tend to write things seven times before I show them to my editor. I write them seven times, then I take them on tour, read them like a dozen times on tour, then go back to the room and rewrite, read and rewrite... I would never show him a first draft, because then he's really going to be sick of it by the twelfth draft. (David Sedaris)

- interview with Tim Clark, 2004...I guess I did about 300-400 drawings for each book and edited them down. When I was working on them I kind of had a rough notion of what the books were about. (David Shrigley)

Kennedy did not have to run the risk of having his ideas and his words shortened and adulterated by a correspondent. This was the television era, not only in campaigning, but in holding the presidency. (Hugh Sidey)

Since we must and do write each our own way, we may during actual writing get more lasting instruction not from another's work, whatever its blessings, however better it is than ours, but from our own poor scratched-over pages. For these we can hold up to life. That is, we are born with a mind and heart to hold each page up to, and to ask: is it valid? (Eudora Welty)

There is a difference between a book of two hundred pages from the very beginning, and a book of two hundred pages which is the result of an original eight hundred pages. The six hundred are there. Only you don't see them. (Elie Wiesel)